Leonard Pitts: Blacks Must Confront Their Homophobia

I generally enjoy Leonard Pitts' columns because he's not afraid to call things as he sees them. His latest column taking on the black community's need to confront and get over its homophobia. Based upon what one sees in the greater Norfolk area where black churches are typically violently homophobic, while large numbers of black men who describe themselves as "not out" can be found cruising on craigslist or gay chat rooms, Pitts' remarks hit home all to accurately. What I find even more outrageous is that time and time again in this area organizations like The Family Foundation and Family Research Council - which in essence are successors to the white segregationists - cynically manipulate black pastors to do their bidding when it comes to anti-gay propaganda. If more people knew true and accurate history (not to mention the history of the leaders of many "pro-family" organizations), I suspect that the black community would have an entirely different outlook on gay rights. Here are highlights from Pitts' column in which he basically bitch slaps Marion Barry for his anti-gay marriage vote on the D.C. Council:

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One wonders how differently that movement might have turned out had white people such as Clifford Durr, Viola Liuzzo, Ralph McGill, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and Lyndon Johnson allowed themselves to be cowed by the angry voices of white men and women saying, ''All hell is going to break loose.'' For that matter, how much longer might the long night of slavery have lasted had white people like Elijah Lovejoy, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucretia Mott and Thaddeus Stevens bowed to the fact that the white community was ''just adamant'' against freedom.

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One wonders, too, whether those black ministers in the hall see their mirror image in generations of white ministers who have used the Bible to condone the evil of slavery (''Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters.'') and the fiction of African-American inferiority (the ''curse'' of Ham).

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At day's end, though, the great tragedy here is neither historical amnesia nor moral cowardice. No, the tragedy is embodied in Barry's description of African Americans as a people for whom open homosexuality is rare. That description is, unfortunately, too accurate -- not simply for black Washington, but for black America. We are a socially conservative people. And our conservatism is, quite literally, killing us.

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It is no coincidence the community that has yet to make a safe place for its gay members to openly be who they are, the community that still regards gay as a dirty secret not to be spoken in open company, the community in which people still think gay ''can't happen in my family,'' is also the community that accounts for half of all AIDS diagnoses in this country, the community that has lost 211,000 brothers and sisters to this disease, the community where marriages keep popping like balloons from the discovery that the husband is gay on the ``down low.''

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The measure of a man, said Dr. King, is where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. Marion Barry should take note. We all should. Where sexuality is concerned, African America lives by lies. We are long overdue to wake up, grow up and speak up to tell the truth openly and without fear. We are dying in this silence. And for what it's worth, Martin's measurement still applies.

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As Pitts notes, HIV/AIDS is a plague in the local black community and too many of the black churches continue to be a force that keeps the "down low" a continuing phenomenon much to the detriment of the black community.